Vibration Compensation of Delta 3D Printer with Position-varying Dynamics using Filtered B-Splines

Abstract

The delta robot is becoming a popular choice for the mechanical design of fused filament fabrication 3D printers because it can reach higher speeds than traditional serial-axis designs. Like serial 3D printers, delta printers suffer from undesirable vibration at high speeds which degrades the quality of fabricated parts. This undesirable vibration has been suppressed in serial printers using linear model-inversion feedforward control methods like the filtered B-splines (FBS) approach. However, techniques like the FBS approach are computationally challenging to implement on delta 3D printers because of their coupled, position-dependent dynamics. In this paper, we propose a methodology to address the computational bottlenecks by (1) parameterizing the position-dependent portions of the dynamics offline to enable efficient online model generation, (2) computing real-time models at sampled points (instead of every point) along the given trajectory, and (3) employing QR factorization to reduce the number of floating-point arithmetic operations associated with matrix inversion. In simulations, we report a computation time reduction of up to 23x using the proposed method, while maintaining high accuracy, when compared to a controller using the computationally expensive exact LPV model. In experiments, we demonstrate significant quality improvements on parts printed at various positions on the delta 3D printer using our proposed controller compared to a baseline alternative, which uses an LTI model from one position. Through acceleration measurements during printing, we also show that the print quality boost of the proposed controller is due to vibration reductions of more than 20\% when compared to the baseline controller.